If the surface of the hard drive isn't physically compromised then there are always ways to recover the data, albeit quite costly ways. Drive recovery typically runs between $250 and $800, plus the cost of a new blank drive, depending on how much effort the repair company has to put into it. Typically they'll run an analysis first and send you a file listing and a couple file samples to show what they can recover and give you a quote for the whole job. At that point you can agree to pay it, or tell them to trash or return the drive for no cost above shipping. Physical damage to the drive's surface rapidly reduces the ability to recover. Fortunately physical damage is pretty rare these days if the drives are handled with reasonable care.

I haven't heard of any recovery services for SSD, but i suppose they'll be coming. CDRoller's new version claims to be able to recover data from corrupt USB thumb drives, memory cards, and other solid state media so it might be of some use on SSDs as well.

(1) - no experience with Hitachi
(2) - extremely good experience with WD
(3) - moderately poor experience with Seagate

What I do now...


...some of the questionable things I've done in the past.

@john dennis-
I'm surprised or curious really, why Sony, which is a Top Shelf electronics giant not designing a high quality, high capacity Video/Audio storage device at an affordable price point with Vegas Pro NLE's in mind.. Or maybe I'm not aware of it.
Portability and cross-platform maybe as a bonus... I'm not sure if I'm making since here, as I am not a computer expert.

Sony does make a "high-quality, high-capacity Video/Audio storage device"

https://pro.sony.com/bbsccms/assets/files/mkt/recmedia/brochures/SonyPortableStorageSpecSheet_PT560A.pdf

Actually, they make all kinds of storage and data management products.

I use SSD as a cache drive for my main drive, but am still reluctant to use one for my main drives or my data drives, despite the tremendous progress being made in reliability, lifetime, and performance.

My main reason for still not making the plunge gets to the very heart of your question, namely, how gracefully do SSD drives fail?

As most of you know, hard drives very often fail gradually. In fact, there are several built-in monitoring tools which provide advanced warning of possible failure. What's more, in the event of a really big failure, you often still have options for retrieving data, including sending the drive to a company that can open it in a clean room and retrieve data from the undamaged portions of the various platters. This is dreadfully expensive, but it is an option that is open to you, if you want to spend the money.

By contrast, from what little I know about SSD drives, they fail without warning. I don't actually know if there are services that can open them up and retrieve data from individual portions of the solid state memory that might have survived whatever event caused the drive to fail. I suspect that data recovery options from a "borked" SSD will be far more limited than from a traditional hard drive, although if someone knows otherwise, I'd be eager to learn about those options.

Seems to me the 2.5" and 3.5 component hard drive market has fewer and fewer manufacturers though "integrators" of storage subsystems seem to be proliferating in the data center space.

I really can't speak for Sony.

@ John Cline-
As I viewed the link you provided, it didn't take long for me to realize that the price point may not be favorable to my wallet.
Price isn't readily available while reading specs and such.

The price point may not be what you like. You can do the same with a 100 dollar class- A brand Blu-ray burner and consistent QA while burning data to disc.

Hitachi hand downs, never Seagate, never again.

For those who have used Hitachi, which is the best choice among their models? They appear to have a Deskstar, Travelstar, Ultrastar and even a Cinemastar, although the Cinemastar only appears to be available in lower capacities.

Review the need for ultimate Hitachi spec - will change in model name - don't go by that silly marketing stuff.
Fast access, Large cache, 6G sata speed - capacity drive at least 1 Terabyte

Agreed, my point should have been made more clearly. Does the Deskstar have adequate performance for video editing work, in the experience of those here who have used them?

Maybe maybe not. ALL depends the rating overall is fair

My archive system is a Drobo 5N NAS with 5 WD Red 3tb drives, set up for single redundancy (one drive can crap out without data loss) and have 10.87tb of storage space available. The Drobo can be set up with double redundancy, but with less storage capacity. the newer models support a SSD that supposedly boosts the performance of the rest of the system and the new models support some of the higher capacity drives available. I believe WD had 4tb red drives now, and i have seen drives up to 6tb, although i do not know how reliable these would be in a Drobo system. The drives are hot swappable, and can be different sizes, make, and model, although mine (with the WD Red drives) has been very dependable.

[I]"My archive system is a Drobo 5N NAS with 5 WD Red 3tb drives, set up for single redundancy."[/I]

You're really skating on thin ice with that.
Say one drive fails. You then only need a single Unrecoverable Read Error to render the data unrecoverable. As drive capacity increases the reliability of RAID 5 decreases. It does for all RAID systems but with RAID 5 as you go beyond 1TB drives the figures are getting pretty bad.

Bob.

"You're really skating on thin ice with that."

Agree. I never saw the point of RAID 5. We use RAID 6 for a couple of our huge database servers that might spread out over 10 or 20 physical drives, but everything else we do is RAID 1.

I changed from RAID 5 to 10 for that reason and it is faster too.

One vital point about RAID is that it's a block based system, not a file based system.

To put that into context, with a file based system a single Unrecoverable Read Error means one file that might not be recoverable.
With a block based system any URE renders all data unrecoverable. You might have only a 1MB JPEG photo on a 10TB 5 x 2TB RAID5 array. If one drive fails then to rebuild the RAID any URE from any of the space on the remaining 4 x 2TB drives will render that one file unrecoverable.

Bob.

Yes, one must always keep in mind that RAID doesn't protect from data error, only hardware failure, to a certain extend.

Well, now i'm beginning to sweat...what is the current consensus on large storage then? I have massive amounts of video files to store for archival reasons and now besides the Drobo, i have them spread out over three machines and several 3.5 hard drives of various sizes that i access by E-Sata docks. These are primarily performance reels, taken by two cameras at each concert, 8 performances each performing season (3) and school performances as well...it adds up quickly. I had other raid systems and have had failures with them with lost data...as far as back-up, well, not any budget for that.

[I]"as far as back-up, well, not any budget for that. "[/I]

If you don't have the budget then your clients aren't paying you enough.
I'm not being trite, I'm in the same position myself, I do keep a single copy of everything out of kindness but if my clients [I]expect[/I] me to keep their footage then that cost money and my time and I have to eat.
I do offer them the option of them keeping a copy on a HDD that they supply.

Bob.

The OP might want to do a little research into recent threads in this forum. This one:

Best hard drive: Hitachi

includes a link in the very first post which takes you to a very useful, large scale, reliability test done by one company that has thousands of disk drives running 24/7 in a big data center. The statistics are very compelling.

There was also a thread almost identical to this one, just a few weeks ago:

Which (non-SSD) Drives Are Most Reliable?

You might want to read through that rather than continuing this parallel thread.

IMHO, if all you want to do is archive, I don't think it makes much difference. I say this because most archiving involves putting the data on the drive, and then putting the drive on the shelf. If the drive doesn't get run very often, then any failure mechanism that is a function of wear and tear won't happen. AFIK, most drive failures ARE the result of usage and not simply a matter of age. So, I'd be perfectly happy getting the cheap Seagate when archiving and then putting the drive on the shelf, and that in fact is what I've been doing for all my archiving.